1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of providing voicemails to a wireless information device. The term ‘wireless information device’ used in this patent specification should be expansively construed to cover any kind of device with two way wireless information capabilities and includes without limitation radio telephones, smart phones, communicators, wireless messaging terminals, personal computers, computers and application specific devices. It includes devices able to communicate in any manner over any kind of network, such as GSM or UMTS, CDMA and WCDMA mobile radio, Bluetooth, IrDA etc.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Voicemail has the sole purpose of storing voice messages from someone trying to call a user's telephone when that user is otherwise unavailable and then relaying those messages to the user when convenient. But today's voicemail systems, particularly for wireless information devices such as mobile telephones, fail to do this intelligently. The primary reason is the nature of the interface from the user's wireless information device to the remote voice mail server: typically, a mobile telephone user will call (or be called by) a voicemail server controlled by the network operator. The voicemail server will generate a synthetic voice announcing the number of messages to the user and then replaying the messages; various options are then spoken by the synthetic voice, such as “press 1 to reply”, “press 2 to delete”, “press 3 to repeat” etc. This presents several challenges to the user: first, he may not have a pen and paper to hand to take down any important information; secondly, he may forget or not be able to hear the options and hence will be unable to operate the voicemail system effectively.
Because of this inadequate and opaque interface, voicemail is not used by at least 45% of mobile telephone users. Of those that do use voicemail, it typically accounts for 30% of a user's call time and spend. One of the reasons for this perhaps surprisingly high level is that, because of the difficult interface, users frequently dial in again just to listen to key messages they did not get the details of the first time round.
Some efforts have been made to make retrieving voicemails easier: reference may be made for example to U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,643 to Breveon Inc: in this patent, voicemail is automatically converted, using a voice recognition computer, to a text message suitable for sending as an e-mail message and for viewing on a text display device such as a PC or laptop computer. Reading a written message can be quicker than having to listen to a spoken voicemail; there is also no need to write down important information from the message since it has already been transcribed. However, automated voicemail systems have quite limited performance and accuracy; they also slavishly transcribe the normal hesitations in human speech (‘er’, ‘um’, ‘ah’ etc.). When one is listening to human speech, one can readily filter out these sounds and concentrate on the substantive communication. Seeing these hesitations slavishly transcribed to an e-mail can make the sender appear less then lucid.
Automated voice to text conversion can in theory also be deployed within a mobile telephone itself: reference may be made to the Nokia Short Voice Messaging system (see EP 1248486) in which a user can speak a message to his mobile telephone, which locally converts it to text using an automated voice recognition engine and then packages and sends it as a SMS message.
The overwhelming bias in the field of voice to text conversion systems is in improving the accuracy of automated voice recognition software; current generation software nevertheless still either needs to be trained to recognise words spoken by a specific person or is limited to recognising a very limited vocabulary and has huge difficulties with context. Training requires the user to read out quite extensive test passages and to then correct the transcription errors introduced by the machine transcription. This is a slow and arduous task. Whilst this avoids the need to input a text message using the small keys of a mobile telephone, it does not address the inherent inaccuracy and inappropriate transcription of conventional automated voice recognition software.
The task of constructing voice recognition software that can reliably and accurately recognise natural speech relating to any subject, from anyone and spoken at normal speed, remains a daunting one. Nevertheless, it remains the over-riding goal in the area of voice to text systems. The present invention challenges this orthodoxy.